Fore!

For Ben's dad's birthday I made a golf themed cake. My first thought was to make a huge golf ball, but again, did not have the sports theme pan and was not quite ready to buy one/Ben told me I did not need it (but someday I'm going to get one). After talking with some friends, I decided to use a 9 x 13 cake pan and design more of a golf scene than an actual golf ball.

In order to make sure I would not have any trouble transporting the cake, I found a piece of wood about 1 inch thick by 24 inches long and 12 inches wide. I covered it in foil and put the cake in the middle of it once it cooled. For the design I wanted to do something realistic but still basic and colorful, and what I came up with was a green next to a sand trap.

To start out, I iced the entire cake with cream cheese icing. I drew a somewhat exaggerated and curvy line with green icing using an icing tip with a small round hole. This line served to separate the green and the sand trap. Right after icing the cake, I put brown sugar on the right half that was going to be the sand trap. I used quite a lot of brown sugar so that it would cover the top and sides and the cake. This stuff really looks like sand! Then for the color for the green, I just mixed green food coloring until I got a bright kelly green. Then I used an icing bag and a tip that was jagged so that it would look like freshly mowed grass. To make the grass I iced one line then move down and ice another line. This was the most tedious and time consuming part of the decorating.

On the green I made a 18th hole flag out of a plastic cocktail sword and cut out 2 little sheets of paper and wrote "18" on both, then glue it to the sword handle and for the hole I used just a little bit of chocolate icing. Once I was done with all of this I still thought the cake was missing something. It just looked too plain to me, so I began calling places like Party City, Kroger, Hobby Lobby to try to find golf figurines or anything to add to the cake. No luck. After just about giving up, I tried Wal-Mart and they said their bakery makes a golf cake and they had the plastic accessories that customers can buy. (I love Wal-Mart!) And just as a little bonus I hot glued golf balls and tees on the board around the cake. I was pretty proud of this cake and can't wait to make another golf cake so I can try out some other ideas.